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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

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Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#411

Post by bluesign »

jacquesm wrote: post #252
kevinsync wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail. Not to mentio…

What amazes me is how many programmers have absolutely no concept about copyright at all. This should be taught as a basic component of any programming course.

Copyright itself is a complex subject, when you apply it to code it gets more complex.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#412

Post by mabedan »

smoghat wrote: post #42

Ok, so here is an interesting case where Claude was almost good enough, but not quite. But I’ve been amusing myself by taking abandoned Mac OS programs from 20 years ago that I find on GitHub and bringing them up to date to work on Apple silicon. For example, jpegview, which was a very fast and simple slideshow viewer. It took about three iterations with Claude code before I had it working. Then it was time to fix so…

Interesting. I switched to the Mac in 2005, and what I missed the most was the fact that in windows you could double click an image and then tap the left and right keys to browse other photos in the same folder. I learned objective c and made an app for it back then, but never published. I guess the jpegview fulfilled a similar purpose.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#414

Post by jacquesm »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #384
martin-t wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is just the stuff you notice. 1) Verbatin copy is first-order plagiarism. 2a) Second-order plagiarism of written text would be replacing words with synonyms. Or taking a book paragraph by paragraph and for each one of them, rephrasing it in your own words. Yes, it might fool automated checkers but the structure would still be a copy of the original book. And most importantly, it would not contain any new inf…

You make several good points, and I appreciate that they appear well thought out. > What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data. At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output diff…

> At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently?

Copyright law... automated transformation preserves copyright. It makes the output a derivative of the input.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#415

Post by jacquesm »

nl wrote: post #399
measurablefunc wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is known as the data processing inequality. Non-invertible functions can not create more information than what is available in their inputs: https://blog.blackhc.net/2023/08/sdpi_fsvi/ . Whatever arithmetic operations are involved in laundering the inputs by stripping original sources & references can not lead to novelty that wasn't already available in some combination of the inputs. Neural networks can at best…

This is simply not true. Modern LLMs are trained by reinforcement learning where they try to solve a coding problem and receive a reward if it succeeds. Data Processing Inequalities (from your link) aren't relevant: the model is learning from the reinforcement signal, not from human-written code.

Ok, then we can leave the training data out of the input, everybody happy.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#417

Post by garretraziel »

manlymuppet wrote: post #322
futuraperdita wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're assuming a pattern existed in 1996 that didn't actually exist until the 2010s. In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files. Even a decade later, React…

I'm not trying to dispute this though. Although I appreciate the clarity, I am aware of the web's past. The only point I was trying to make was that this project could be better achieved by an LLM if spacejam.com 's HTML is supplied. For why you'd want to do this rather than simply use the original code is up to the developer, but I'd expect a common reason to be the ease of modern frameworks. Some justifications for…

I think that the reason why everyone is acting surprised about your suggestion is that the target wasn’t to obtain the page in some higher level framework or anything. The HTML of the page was what the author wanted Claude to output. Would he used source HTML as an input, there would be nothing for Claude to do. Different exercise.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#418

Post by jacquesm »

measurablefunc wrote: post #381
jacquesm wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here is a correct, standard correction: It does this all the time, but as often as not then outputs nonsense again, just different nonsense, and if you keep it running long enough it starts repeating previous errors (presumably because some sliding window is exhausted).

That's been my general experience and that was the most recent example. People keep forgetting that unless they can independently verify the outputs they are essentially paying OpenAI for the privilige of being very confidently gaslighted.

It would be a really nice exercise - for which I unfortunately do not have the time - to have a non-trivial conversation with the best models of the day and then to rigorously fact-check every bit of output to determine the output quality. Judging from my own (probably not a representative sample) experience it would be a very meager showing.

I use AI as a means of last resort only now and then mostly as a source of inspiration rather than a direct tool aiming to solve an issue. And like that it has been useful on occasion, but it has at least as often been a tremendous waste of time.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#419

Post by master-lincoln »

alt227 wrote: post #398
wilsmex wrote: post #187

Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however: "The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.". This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a th…

Off topic, but you have used imgur as your image hosting site, which cannot be viewed in the UK. If you want all readers to be able to see and understand your points, please could you use a more universally reachable host?

Which one could be used so everybody can read it? So many different autocratic systems to think about...

I think it's easier if you adapt and get a VPN or a new government.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#420

Post by jacquesm »

handoflixue wrote: post #295
jacquesm wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that to be a counterexample? In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input, the question is really how large the largest re-usable fragment was and whether or not barring some transformations you could trace it back to the original. I've done some experiments along the same lines to see what it spits out and what I noticed is that from example to example the programm…

> In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input Yes, and Shakespeare merely copied the existing 26 letters of the English alphabet. What magical process do you think students are using when they read and re-combine learned examples to solve assignments?

This same argument has now been made a couple of times in this thread (in different guises) and does absolutely nothing to move the conversation forward.

Words and letters are not copyrightable patterns in and of themselves. It is the composition of words and letters that we consider to be original creations and 'the bard' put them in a meaningful and original order not seen before, which established his reputation as a playwright.

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